by Su Ann

This piece is part of In Common, a collaborative writing series where voices from across the healthcare community respond to a single shared word - Threshold

The resus bay doors have a particular weight to them. You cross them and become someone else.

The four-month-old came in at 2 a.m. Febrile, floppy, her mother’s face already doing what faces do when grief starts too early. She’s my daughter’s age, I thought briefly, then never again. There is no room in the algorithm. Airway. Access. Antibiotics within the hour. Somewhere behind my sternum, a door stayed shut.

She lived. I tell you this not because the outcome is the point. We pass these stories around as though the ending does the damage. It doesn’t. It is the doorway, and everything you leave standing outside it.

Nobody warns you the threshold works both ways.

Home past midnight. My seven-year-old had drawn me a card. As I stood in my own kitchen, on the wrong side of a door I had shut myself, whispering “so lovely, sweetheart” from very far away.

Later, a young doctor asked me after a death, “I feel numb. Is that normal?” I reached for the sentence I had been handed at her age: distance, boundaries, wellbeing, and stopped. Half-truths have load-bearing walls.

“You feel nothing because right now it isn’t safe enough to. It might arrive next Thursday, in a car park, with nothing to do with the child. That is not a malfunction. That is the bill finally coming due.”

She cried. Nobody had ever let me.

Last month, my eleven-year-old asked if I was sad. I said yes. Something sad did happen, but it isn’t yours to carry, and you were right to notice. 

She thought about this. Then she asked for a hug.

The door stayed open. The house did not flood.

Healing isn’t arrival. It is the repeated crossings of thresholds in both directions and the only work is to feel the weight of the door in your hand.

Su Ann is a physician, healthcare educator, mother, daughter and sister; roles she carries with equal care. She spends her days at the meeting point of medicine, education and humanity, treating patients at their most vulnerable and teaching the doctors, nurses, and students who will do the same, all while raising her family and tending to the people she loves. She writes as someone still finding her way, crossing thresholds in both directions and still learning about life as she goes.